Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Rhythm
Kai Does Red…Again
Rendezvous
The Christening
Seeing Stars
Maddie’s Journal
Lujon 1
Crystal’s Desire and Shango’s Feast
Sojourner’s Truth
Shared Heat
Magick - folade mondisa speaks-love
Talk to Me
Shout
Miss Cicero
The Call
Funky Ride
The Warehouse
Palimpsest
Notes to You
Meeting Eros
About the Authors
About the Editor
Copyright Page
For my grandmothers, my mothers, my sisters, and my aunts. For all the women whose love of life and zest for loving fully and completely informs me. For the freaky black girls everywhere who continue to liberate our bodies and our minds.
Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thang, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Please get over the notion that your particular “thing” is
something that only the deepest, saddest, the most nobly tor-
tured can know. It ain’t. It’s just one kind of sex—that’s all.
And in my opinion, the universe turns regardless.
—Lorraine Hansberry
Introduction
Samiya A. Bashir
Touch. Like the pages of this volume, we all need to be touched, caressed, flipped, turned, and read with passion. Our senses need inspiration to open and flare, to allow the flow of sensory input, ever present in our world, to wash through our bodies and into the spiritual realm housed within. All too often we go through our everyday lives, accepting an increasing amount of input and information, rarely even stopping to filter it, or (rarer still) insisting on that input which strokes and kisses our imaginations.
I hope that this collection does just that. I hope these stories stretch their tender fingertips to touch you, the reader, in ways that force you to stop and enjoy the sensation. In compiling and constructing this second edition of Best Black Women’s Erotica, it was important both to be true to the scope of the series and to offer something unique in the process. As I accepted this challenge I reached back to mine my own trunk of memories. I wanted to find not only moments of change and growth, but the inspiration for those moments. What I found illuminated the idea of difference. In this collection, it was important for me to present as wide a berth of black women’s experience as possible. The range—which covers age, region, physical ability, sexual orientation, identity, and the multiple types of relationships we create for ourselves—hopes to provide a mirror for some women, and a window to others.
Best Black Women’s Erotica 2 includes twenty stories written by women from diverse backgrounds, each with a unique story to tell. The volume opens with “Rhythm,” Donna Sherard’s examination of the erotic in everyday experience. The story takes one woman, getting her hair braided by two experts while waiting for the return of her lover, into the dreamworld of fantasy, led by touch.
Opal Palmer Adisa and D. H. Brent craft characters for whom the relationship is not the point, or so they hope; the point is the need to be fulfilled, to feel as the light inside the spark. Camille Banks-Lee, folade mondisa speaks-love, and Michele Elliott imagine relationships that celebrate their sexual selves. Love is explored through the telephone wires and Internet cables, inspired by music and film, and takes place in spaces at once familiar, changed, and completely new. “Palimpsest,” by R. Erica Doyle, takes readers’ expectations, and any last grasp at taboo, and puts them through the spin cycle, tumbling faster and faster until they jerk to a stop, and come out hot, changed, slightly singed, and with the smell of rebirth.
The things that we choose to eroticize also speak volumes about how we filter all that input. Robin G. White’s story of a gospel organist and her congregant, “Shout,” draws a direct line between the physical and the spiritual, inviting readers to “feel the spirit” in a whole new way. Tracy Price-Thompson mines a driving need that pushes far past fleeting lust to find strength in the desolation of a desert war. In “Shared Heat,” she brings together a photographer and an infantry commander leading his troops to a hopeless and probably pointless death. Their near-wordless exchange must pack the explosive passion of a lifetime into one cold, silent night. Kimberly White looks into a future where the line between the breath of life and the blink of automation merges with a woman and her made-to-order lover.
Throughout this collection, the senses are engaged. In Kiini Ibura Salaam’s “Kai Does Red…Again” the story is told to the backbeat of the club music threatening to burst through the bathroom door. Tara Betts explores the sense of sound and the sensuality of speech in “Talk to Me.” Janeé Bolden uses hip-hop as a metronome, and Dorothy Randall Gray’s full, powerful, and sensual “Miss Cicero” finds her passion reading Zora Neale Hurston to a longtime friend. In the end, Carol Smith Passariello uses the photographer’s lens to break through the barriers of fear and shame as a group of friends learn together how to find their own inner and outer beauty.
Take it in all at once, or stretch it with slow, savory sips. Let the stories enfold you for a moment, let them touch and stroke you, body and spirit. Drink them in, spit them back out if you like, but savor the taste. These stories will have you coming back for more.
Samiya A. Bashir
New York
December 2002
Rhythm
Donna Sherard
Living in Kampala requires patience to learn to flourish within the rise and fall of natural movements that mark the passage of the day. Watches are rendered unnecessary. Each day falls into a calculated and undulating rhythm. To the newly initiated, this rhythm creates what may seem to be a haphazard and unplanned environment, regularly punctuated by daily electricity outages, quizzical traffic patterns, and phone delays. I have just begun to realize, however, that only a fool would try to define or label this city as anything abnormal or disorganized. I have begun to understand that life in in Kampala, and especially during the rainy season, is managed by a seductive rhythm guided by daylight and rain that is very methodical, indeed. I have also had to come to terms with the reality that living here happily requires adjustment to this rhythm. Everything here moves to the calculated staccato, yielding a magic that can only be described as both expected and yet very unexpected.
Every day, Kampala’s rhythm starts at just before sunrise when something in the easy breeze encourages the rooster, owned by the neighboring guesthouse, to croak his morning alarm. After three weeks of mornings here with Daudi, I have come to understand the wakeup pattern of our cackling neighbor. His voice is comically rusty at first, sounding almost like a human imitation. Soon after his warm-up, however, his lubricated and lusty vocal cords break out into full alto vibrato that sounds from within the confines of his breast, and screams through his beak.
This Friday, this day fourteen of my twenty-eight-day cycle, also began with the familiar moist pressure in my loins that accompanied the rooster’s orchestrated cries. Thirty was seemingly now a curse, as sex for me had lost some of its wild abandon. My innate, physical desire “to get some” was usually now at its greatest crescendo only when I was also feeling the pinch of ovulation. This morning, and in its own timely rhythm, nature’s desire to reproduce woke me with an insuppressible and very hopeful horniness. The hopefulness was, unfort
unately, irrelevant, for this morning was different. Daudi wasn’t here. Having traveled home to Nairobi for work almost a week ago, he wouldn’t be coming back until well after Kampala’s day’s end, long after sundown, and long after the pungent smell of smoking rot—Friday’s burned garbage—had blown to the bottom of the hill.
Today was also the first day of the rainy season, and while it had not yet rained, its promise left our bedroom humid. The still uncooled mid-April heat made the mosquito net feel thick as cheesecloth. I lay still as my overactive imagination felt Daudi’s fingers moving up my legs and, finding the joining of my thighs soaking wet and my clitoris hard as tanzanite, he would then straddle me and we’d make love. I was left to merely imagine, however, to bookmark that thought for this evening. Lying spread-eagled across our bed reminded me, again, that he was still not here.
Before he left on Monday we had lain on this same bed together, still sweaty and nude from our preliminary good-byes. I watched his profile as his lips spilled a litany of of concerns about leaving me alone, in his deep Kikuyu accent. This one week would be our longest separation since I had returned, and he sounded frighteningly like my father.
“Remember to call Wamala if you need to go anywhere, and please don’t forget to lock the car doors at the roundabouts. Can you remember to close the windows at night and spray the room and turn on the mosquito zappers?”
Daudi was forever worried about my falling victim to crimes usually reserved for Muzungus and other foreigners in traffic, and he took my Michigan blood—and the fact that it had not yet been baptized with malaria—as his single greatest responsibility.
“Babes, I will be fine,” I had assured him.
In actuality, while not at all terrified at his leaving me alone in this house shortly after my relocation here, I had struggled with the onset of two emotions: first, hating that we were about to be separated even for a week so soon after our previous nine-month hiatus, and second, hating the fact that I was feeling so damn needy.
Last Monday, the prospect of the one-week separation had seemed like a lifetime, and I was now emotionally and very physically anxious for his return. Daudi and I, both far too cynical to have pet names for our body parts, never baptized his penis or my vagina with any names other than “dick” and “pussy” (words whose meanings had thankfully transcended our cross-cultural backgrounds). Today, I could think of nothing but their reacquaintance as I opened my eyes on this Friday. With the persistent throbbing in my crotch bordering on ridiculous, I allowed a fleeting thought of quenching my own thirst through a brief tangle with my makeshift soapstone dildo—originally, a mildly phallic-shaped figurine Daudi had brought me from Nairobi. I quickly changed my mind as I remembered that for the past three nights, this had already proved to be an unsatisfying option. While certainly hard, the figurine never seemed to get warm enough, and certainly didn’t vibrate like “Pinky,” whom I had left in the States for fear of embarrassment at the Ugandan customs inspection. Although I smiled to myself at the thought of the soaking-wet welcome Daudi would come home to tonight, I somehow knew that my decision to not masturbate away my inflated libido this morning would have its own frustrating consequences.
The sun, now close to full throttle, decorated the bedroom with stripes as it passed through the glass-levered windows. The rooster’s cacophony had now yielded to the next round of sounds that marked the slow unfolding of the morning. They began in perfectly timed succession with the barking of the German shepherds that volunteered to guard the neighboring Kabira School. The dogs knew, by the tilt of the sun, when breakfast would be tossed at them through the kitchen doors. At the same time, our version of a motorized rush hour passed with the buzzing sound of the moped boda-boda taxis that ferried neighbors to the more well traveled Kironde Road. I knew that as they became less frequent it was getting past any acceptable time to get up. My punishment would certainly be meted out if I still found myself lying here unwashed and unfed to hear the slight click of the daily, induced off-cycle of our electricity, and the whirring swell of the generator next door, indicating the end of hot water and the ability to cook my breakfast, not having a generator ourselves. Again, slow to adjust to Kampala’s own means of telling time, I still had to confirm through a roll of my body toward the bedroom digital clock what this city already knew, that it was eight A.M., just one hour before my nine o’clock appointment with the hair braiders.
After getting dressed, I moved downstairs to sit close enough to the door to listen for what would undoubtedly be a verysoftknock.Ugandanwomen, as was culturally prescribed, usually tapped to announce their presence in the same hushed tones in which they spoke. Their voices often so quiet, they encouraged a natural intimacy, as I was often forced to lean into their breath to have any conversation at all.
As I waited, I sat watching little colored birds dancing though the bush outside our window like confetti, basking in what would undoubtedly be one of their last dry mornings for a while. Having lived through last year’s rainy season, I knew today would probably see the sun alternate with the clouds until the clouds, swollen and dark, finally relieved themselves of very heavy rain that would last for weeks.
I then heard it, the soft “brush-tap” on the door followed by muffled female voices.
I opened the door and Penninah stood under the now darkened but still dry sky, with one other woman. The woman, while striking, bore the telltale orange-tinged face and dark walnut neck that betrayed her use of Fair and Light bleaching cream. Upon my beckoning, they waved into the foyer with a quick gust that simultaneously rustled their skirts and the black plastic cavera undoubtedly holding my new hair.
“Good morning, Madame,” they both said with smiles.
“Good morning, please come in.”
They entered and their sandals shuffled on the tile floor. As they moved past me I felt a tingling, surprisingly erotic warmth that transformed my entryway and enveloped the energy Daudi and I had created in this house together.
“Madame,” Penninah hush-whispered. “Where shall we work?”
“Penninah, please call me Nicole, and we can do the braiding in the living room,” I said. While Ugandans held tightly to the formal systems of social order that designated me as “Madame,” at merely age thirty, I was having a problem with conforming.
Penninah smiled, acknowledging my request, and turned to introduce her partner. “Nicole, this is Biira.”
Biira, quickly looking at me and then away, shook my hand in hers. While she gripped my extended hand very lightly I felt a warmth travel the length of my forearm. As we stood I felt them both quietly assessing my short Afro, undoubtedly calculating how it would braid, and how long we would be there together.
We moved to the next room where I had already pulled our most comfortable, cushioned wicker chair to the middle of the floor. The room was now sun-filled and the curtains, billowing with the breeze, seemed to welcome the women into its confines.
“You’ll sit there?” Penninah half asked, half stated.
“Yes, will that be OK?” I asked, not sure if they would find the height appropriate.
“It is fine.” She turned to say something in Luganda to Biira and it was then that I realized that Biira was not shy as much as just not comfortable with English, and somewhat still in shock as she discovered through my accent that I was something she had never seen: an American who was also black. Penninah and I had met before; I guess she had not passed along what I had long ago discovered to be very big news here in Uganda.
Penninah gestured to the chair and I sat. They both stood over me, gently pulling at my short hair and briefly feeling my roots with their thumbs and forefingers. As they moved closer to either side of me, I could feel the convection of their heat and smell a hint of breakfast on their breath as they spoke.
“Nicole, is this natural or is there something in your hair?” Penninah asked as she stroked the curls behind my ear. In spite of the fact that any arousal caused by her touch was obviousl
y unintentional—she, of course, couldn’t know what Daudi’s touch behind my ear usually made me do—I felt a warm rush between my legs.
“I have a texturizer,” I confessed, hesitantly.
“OK,” she said. And with that they swept into fluid action, moving to the dining table to pull from the plastic bag the reddish brown hair they would soon attach to my head.
“We must first divide the hair, and we need Vaseline,” Penninah said softly, over her shoulder.
As Penninah spoke, I was lost in the contrast of Biira’s skin, orange and then fading to black as her chest disappeared under her clothes. Her white blouse was missing a button, for which she compensated with a safety pin between her breasts. I watched her hips shift underneath her floral skirt as she balanced on one leg then the other, matching the rhythm of of her arms separating small pieces of hair from the large, stringy wad that lay on the table.
“I’m sorry, do either of you want some tea, or juice?” Clearly I had forgotten my manners as I bounced back from my stare.
Penninah repeated this in Luganda, to which Biira quietly responded, “Just water, please.”
As I poured water into a glass I looked out of the window above the sink at the swaying banana leaves to the left of our driveway. The sky had suddenly turned a foreboding and dark slate blue, playing a deep contrast to the green leaves. I heard an engine stutter on somewhere in the distance and wondered why the presence of these women was causing me chills and why I found my eyes lingering a little too long on Biira. While I could blame sexual neglect from the past week, I still felt somewhat guilty. I felt so close and private here in my home with Daudi. It had become just us, physically and emotionally. We had not had many guests since my return and, instead, spent much of our weekends naked, rediscovering beauty marks and hot-spots. Today, with the arrival of the braiders, however, I felt a hot swelling very familiar and yet very different; our love nest had been temporarily recolored. The thought of sitting between these two women fondling my head as twelve hours passed created an arousing warmth I thought was now reserved only for Daudi, or at the very least for men. As I finished in the kitchen, listening to the low hum of Penninah and Biira’s voices, I felt my nipples harden under my T-shirt like two kernels of corn.
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